What It Feels Like to Watch Donald Trump as a Brown Person

My grandfather moved to Canada from India in the mid-1960s, when black people were marching through America's streets demanding rights they never should have had to ask for. Dadaji was not sure where Indians fit into America's racial struggle. Like many immigrants coming to the West, he had escaped a childhood of poverty and was looking to raise his kids some place where they wouldn't have to fight so hard to make a good living. He was considering moving to America from Canada, but before he uprooted my grandmother and their three children again, he visited a few restaurants in America as a litmus test for how brown people might be treated there. Americans were ruder, service was slower, and he was stared at more. So he remained in the suburbs of Toronto, where he has lived ever since.

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When he calls me these days, he asks about how and why Donald Trump has risen to political power. As one of his only grandchildren born and raised in America, I have trouble explaining what is happening in my country right now. I don't know what to say.

Trump announced this week that he wants to ban all Muslims from entry into America. As a result, this became a real subject politicians are debating on TV in a country presented as a model for democracy and human rights around the world. As I passed by strangers in one of America's most liberal cities on my way to work on Tuesday morning, I wondered if they held the same disappointment and disbelief that I did, or whether they now looked at me with suspicion. Harboring this doubt made me feel so isolated.

I am not Muslim. But I am brown-skinned; I am Indian. And because racism is all about making inane judgements based on skin color, bigots don't really differentiate between me and someone who might be of a similar skin color but a totally different cultural background. Like many of my friends, I remember where I was when airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers on 9/11: tenth-grade honors geometry at my high school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It was a Tuesday, a day of crying in hallways and hugging friends and family. After school, I don't remember where I went – cross country practice, most likely. When I got home, my dad was angry. He scolded me for not coming straight home; we could get assaulted by people who think we are terrorists, he said. I was used to being approached by elderly strangers who wanted to welcome me to America, to kids who asked me "what kind of Indian I was," and to adults who assumed I wanted to study medicine. But on 9/11, I was introduced to a new sort of racism – the kind that associated my skin color with my physical safety.

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Since 9/11, every brown person knows there are places where we need to look as presentable and bland as possible: at airports, at border crossings, sometimes at gas stations and diners in rural towns. In my family, we ameliorate the tension by joking about it. My mother will tease my brother about shaving his beard, saying a border agent will think he's a terrorist, when secretly she just wants to see her son clean shaven. (Except we all know that the terrorism part is not really a joke; in the days after 9/11, being a disheveled brown man with a beard means you're likely to be hassled and even harassed.)

There are words you do not say at the airport – not even sarcastically, not even ironically, not even as a joke, not even paraphrasing the news – you do not you utter the words, "bomb," "guns," "terrorist," in a sentence. After 9/11, I remember me and family members being frisked, our luggage searched in multiple "random checks," wondering how random they were. I have no proof that these incidents were tied to my race, but when I try to parse out whether or not any of this was racially motivated, I think about how this lingering doubt is just another insidious effect of racism.

As the Paris attacks were happening last month, I absorbed the news with the same mounting horror and anxiety as I did on 9/11. I was sad for the victims, and I was sad for Muslim-Americans and brown people in America. On my Facebook newsfeed, I saw friends and colleagues beginning to brace themselves for the racial backlash they knew was coming. When the San Bernardino shooting happened, the fear intensified. Islamophobia is now worse than it was after 9/11.

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The frustration I feel right now is a fraction of what many Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs are feeling. I have never been assaulted in an apparent hate crime, as 57-year-old Rohit Patel was in New Jersey in July. As an atheist, I do not run the risk of being threatened during prayer like those who worship in mosques and temples. If you want to know how deeply this conversation affects and hurts Muslim-Americans, read this Facebook post by Sofia Ali-Khan.

"The rhetoric about Muslims has gotten so nasty, and is everywhere, on every channel, every newsfeed. It is clearly fueling daily events of targeted violence, vandalism, vigilante harassment, discrimination," she wrote on Monday night. "I want you to know that it has gotten bad enough that my family and I talk about what to keep on hand if we need to leave quickly, and where we should go, maybe if the election goes the wrong way, or if folks get stirred up enough to be dangerous before the election. When things seem less scary, we talk about a five or a ten year plan to go somewhere where cops don't carry guns and hate speech isn't allowed on network television."

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The rhetoric coming from one of our most visible presidential candidate's mouths cannot be dismissed simply as Trump being Trump. According to a new Bloomberg Politics/Purple Strategies PulsePoll poll, Trump's anti-Muslim views resonate with 65 percent of likely GOP primary voters, and his fascist comments have encouraged more racists to come out of the woodwork. Former Congressman Joe Walsh called Islam a "cancer" and said of Muslims: "If they're not going to learn to assimilate, I don't want them in this country." Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. told a crowd that "if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walk in and kill us."

Of course, I knew these people existed. But what shocks me is how, in the age of Donald Sterling and Paula Deen, these white men have no awareness that these attitudes are considered shameful. They are not trying to hide how racist they are – in fact, they go out of their way to hurl violent speech at rallies and to reporters on TV. Trump and those who support him have made it safe to be openly racist in America.

There is pushback, but not enough. White House press secretary Josh Earnest has spoken against Trump, saying his comments "disqualified" him for presidency. The New York Daily News published a powerful cover standing in solidarity with Muslims. Trump was even cut off of MSNBC in an uncomfortable news segment by conservative commentator Joe Scarborough. A few mayors across America have expressed disgust by talking about banning Trump from their cities. The show of intolerance against Trump's intolerance has been a faint silver lining throughout all of this.

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But on Tuesday, as I was thinking hard about how Americans have enabled his rise and how we can stop enabling it, I was struck by how, interview after interview on mainstream cable, statement after statement made by politicians, I saw almost exclusively white men and women in control of a conversation on issues that affect me and people who look like me. It was as if I were an abstract concept. They were referring to me in the third person, when I was in the same room.

There is a lot of pressure to stay invisible. I was uncomfortable even writing this piece, because I feel as though I need to be an ally to the Muslim community and not overshadow with my own experiences of brownness. I spoke about this internal conflict with Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, founder of MuslimGirl.net. She pointed out that my conflict is yet more evidence of the twisted logic of racism. "I honestly think that you are so entitled to speak up about it, because if anything, that shows how the uneducated racism we're experiencing right now is impacting far more people beyond the Muslim community," she told me.

Donald Trump "is a great American," my dadaji joked, when I told him I was writing about him. "I'm not as worthy as Donald Trump for an article." He uses America's insanity as a hook to lure me back to Canada, highlighting that Canada's prime minister is a feminist, its democratic institutions minister is a 30-year-old Afghan refugee, and that a Sikh man has become the defense minister (In America, Sikh men aren't even allowed to serve).

"It's amazing how many Americans like him and approve of him," my grandfather said. "I cannot believe that so many Americans like him and think he is right." I admit that recently, the offer to relocate to a more tolerant country has become rather tempting. But if I do that, the bigots will get the final say. And, though I worry about where our country is heading, leaving seems impossible.

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